Booming appetites for crime, sci-fi and romance drive fiction sales 20% higher than in 2019, with Richard Osman the year’s bestselling author
Book sales continued to climb last year despite lockdowns, with more than 212m print books sold in 2021 – the highest figure of the last decade.
Driven by booming appetites for crime novels, sci-fi, fantasy, romance and personal development titles, sales last year showed an increase of 5% on 2020. The sales were worth £1.82bn – a 3% increase on 2020, and the first year on record that sales have topped £1.8bn. The figures were released on Tuesday by Nielsen BookScan, which was forced to fill in lockdown data gaps with estimates based on its monthly consumer surveys, which collect data from around 3,000 book buyers each month. Bookshops across the
UK were shut for over three months at the start of 2021.
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (Penguin £8.99)
The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy (Ebury £16.99)
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Canongate £8.99)
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman (Penguin £18.99)
Pinch of Nom: Quick and Easy by Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson (Pan Macmillan £20)
Guinness World Records 2022 (Guinness World Records £20)
And Away … by Bob Mortimer (Simon & Schuster £20)
Megamonster by David Walliams (HarperCollins £14.99)
Windswept and Interesting by Billy Connolly (John Murray Press £25)
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (Little, Brown £8.99)